Amazon supercharges GPU power, spits out Nvidia-backed G3

Get your office benchmarking Crysi- *cough* I mean, working

It comes in three flavours: g3.4xlarge (1 GPU), g3.8xlarge (2 GPUs), and g3.16xlarge (4 GPUs). The line is meant for 3D modelling, visualisation, video encoding and other graphics-intensive apps.

Amazon's G2 line first came out in 2013. The high-horse, introduced later on in 2015, was the g2.8xlarge, which came with four Nvidia Grid GPUs with 4GB of video memory and 1,536 CUDA Cores each. You could encode four 1080p video streams or eight real-time 720p video streams, Amazon said in a blog post.

The GPUs in the new G3 family come with 8GB of GPU memory, 2,048 parallel processing cores, multi-monitor support, enhanced graphics-rendering effects, Nvidia GRID Virtual Workstation features, and enhanced networking. You could record 10 H.265 (HEVC) 1080p30 streams and up to 18 H.264 1080p30 streams, Amazon said in another blog post.

To compare to the previous g2.8xlarge with 60GiB of memory and 32 vCPUs (because why not compare the best to the best), the new g3.16xlarge instance comes with 488 GiB of main memory and 64 vCPUs.

The g2.8xlarge cost $2.808 hourly on demand with Linux in Ireland, whereas g3.16xlarge costs $4.84, according to Amazon's current price list.